


Yellow

by Plutorabbit



Category: Big Bang (Band), K-pop, f(x)
Genre: Adolescence, Ambition, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Growing Up, Other, Romance, Teenage Drama, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-19 18:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7373491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plutorabbit/pseuds/Plutorabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Jung Soojung was Van Gogh, <br/>Choi Seunghyun was her yellow paint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Vincent Van Gogh was going through his darkest times, surrounded by his own demons transfused in the form of splatters on cold canvases and solemn portraits too heavy to hang on his plaster walls, the post-impressionist painter ate his yellow paint. He had hoped, with all of his tattered soul, that the brightness and solidity of the cheery substance would color the walls of his insides and radiate some happiness, no matter how small, up to the empty space on the left side of his chest. Never mind that paint was toxic, and that a color could not possibly have that much to do with a person’s happiness. Vincent Van Gogh was, without question, drowned in his own madness.

  
Jung Soojung wanted to paint her insides yellow like Van Gogh did. Of course she was nowhere near the level of desperation the artist had experienced, neither was she diagnosed with any illnesses. She could hardly get a certified day off school, let alone be diagnosed with thirty different forms of insanity. But Soojung had her own yellow paint. Deluding, destructive, but immensely gratifying. Jung Soojung’s yellow paint took the form of a boy, six feet tall with shoulders that cast shadows over her and eyes that penetrated the ten layers of ice she wore as her second skin. Jung Soojung had Choi Seunghyun. And Choi Seunghyun was poison, much stronger than any paint Vincent Van Gogh had ever tasted.  
  


For Soojung, crushes came and went so often she couldn’t keep track even if she tried. For a week, the bespectacled top scorer in third grade was the boy she wanted to hold hands with forever, and then winter break came and she was sure she wanted to marry the older boy with the crescent eyes that delivered their milk every Wednesday. Every new face she met on the bus rides in middle school made her feel something, and every new kid she was assigned to sit with in class made her forget the name of her previous desk partner. It wasn’t that Soojung didn’t find it strange how her heart couldn’t settle. There just wasn’t any reason to question herself. When Jihyun, her best friend (and only friend) for all of middle school had confessed to the boy in the next class that she’d been crushing on him for 2 years, Soojung thought it was crazy. She wondered if more girls were stupidly dedicated like Jihyun, or just looking for little excitements to get them through the day like herself.  
  


**If she wanted to keep picking crushes, she shouldn’t have raised her head when she did in the second semester of first year.** If she really wanted the short-term thrills, then she shouldn’t even have come to this school. Jihyun was three neighborhoods away, with her crush of two years and first love. Soojung never had a problem being the third-wheel, so she should have stuck with that. But she made her own choices, picked her own seats in class, and laid eyes on any pretty face she fancied. And she fancied Choi Seunghyun.  
  


When he first walked into class with his taper cut jet black hair and his tie pulled perfectly to his collar, the boys in the back row snickered and threw potential nicknames across the room in not-so-quiet whispers. When he first walked into class, Soojung had her head on the desk and her eyes glued to chapter 34 of Fashion King on her smartphone. _You can’t afford to mess with this kid so be nice_ , was the last thing she heard before an overwhelming presence filled the vacant seat in front of her. She lifted her head to the scent of coffee and vanilla, and the only color she could see was blue. Because blue was the color of their school blazer. All the better, she mumbled to herself as she took her smartphone out from between her textbook pages. Overgrown boys always came in handy.

  
Right before she met eyes with Choi Seunghyun, her crushes for that semester were the class president Lee Minki, and the year three senior who suavely retrieved a library book she needed from the upper shelves. Lee Minki wore his watch on the inside of his wrist. That was something Soojung couldn’t understand, but found particularly cute. She thought about the two guys at least twice a day, and it made her want to draw bubble hearts on the bottom of her pages. But then it happened. It was the end of math class, and her 2B pencil had rolled off the table and conveniently fallen on the right of Choi Seunghyun’s Nike sneakers. She had her right arm outstretched in a failed attempt to catch it, and she stayed in that position as she watched the new kid reach down and pick it up.

_  
One_ was when he glanced back at Soojung with curious eyes, and then pulled out his pencil sharpener to fix her chipped pencil for her.

_  
Two_ was when he had his torso turned to face her, gently laying the pencil onto her desk in line with her pencil case.

_  
Three_ when he stood up and pushed his chair under the table before leaving.

  
Three was the magic number for all things special. That was what half the romance novels she’d read had suggested. Three was the number of times their eyes met on his first day of school. And three was all it took.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Choi Seunghyun was a neat freak. He probably had OCD or something of that sort because his shirt was always clean and crisp, with not a single crease line or spec of dust in sight. His blazer always looked like it had just come out of the dry cleaner’s, and his shoes were never soiled for more than two days. He didn’t make dog ears on important pages of his textbooks, and key points were highlighted on a ruler. Who still bothered using a ruler in high school? The kid to his right even drew graphs with his free hand. Not that it was something Soojung would do, but the way he was made him stick out from the entire cohort like a dash of red ink on white paper.

  
And red was the color of her notebook in which she had filled with scattered thoughts of her new interest.

  
He smelled like coffee and vanilla. He wore his watch under the sleeve of his right wrist. He wrote his essays with all the right punctuations but skipped on spacings in his personal notes. He always brought his own sandwiches for lunch, and sat at the bench by the basketball court. He sank deeper into his seat during Literature classes and took extra notes in Chemistry. Occasionally the other boys pulled at the knot of his tie and told him to stop making them look bad at everything, but he always straightened it right back and dusted his blazer like their hands were too dirty for him. He didn’t like being touched.

  
Soojung didn’t make it a point to observe his every move and memorize his little quirks and habits. They just stuck with her, because he was just there. He was always just right in front of her. If he pushed his fringe out of his eyes, she saw it and thought, ah his hair is getting long. If he leaned forward just an inch to look at the whiteboard, she saw it and wondered if he was short sighted. When it was lunch time and the wind blew the cover of his notebook open, she saw it and realized how small his letters were. And then halfway through the day, when her lids started to feel heavy, she rested her head on one half of her red notebook and let her writing hand take control on the other half. And before she knew it, she had a whole spread of doodles and little scribbled facts all about that one boy. And it went on every day.

  
Until one Friday.

  
Choi Seunghyun was a neat freak. When the loudest and tardiest kid in class, Jungho held out a shabby red notebook to his face, he cringed at the sight of it.

  
“You’re welcome.” the obnoxious rank-number-28-in-a-class-of-30 said, and Choi Seunghyun thought, what’s his problem?

  
He took the notebook between his thumb and index finger, and set it on top of all the other books in his locker.

  
“What’s this?” he finally asked, his eyes still scanning the collage of doodles on the cover.

  
“You dropped it in the court after gym class. I picked it up by the benches.”

  
He eased his palm across the messy cover and pressed at the edges to straighten the creases.

  
“it’s not mine, though…” he muttered, his voice trailing off as his eyes landed on the three syllables written in small black bubble characters.

  
최승현

  
Why was his name written on the cover of a book that wasn’t his? He flipped through the pages in search of a different name, hopefully the actual owner’s. But all the used pages were filled with Chemistry equations and formulas, song lyrics and sketches of… himself. He shuffled to a different page and found more scribbles of his name written in various writing styles. He shut the notebook and looked back at Jungho. He was already in his seat, making paper balls out of his own failed essays. Choi Seunghyun mechanically turned back to his locker and took a step forward, shielding the contents from any possible wandering eyes. After staring blankly at the back wall of their classroom for a minute or two, he slid his new discovery right to the end of his locker and slammed it shut.

  
The thing about this new crush of Soojung’s was that nothing had to be acted on. She liked Choi Seunghyun’s big hands and slender fingers, but she didn’t feel the urge to hold them. She thought his hair was always sticking out in the right places, but she never felt the urge to brush her hands through them. She thought his fox-like eyes were beautiful, but she never wanted to look into them for more than two seconds. Soojung liked Choi Seunghyun, but not in the way girls liked boys in all the dramas she watched.

  
So on a Monday morning of second year, when Choi Seunghyun walked down the row of desks and didn’t stop at his seat but hers, her heart was beating wildly but she didn’t look up. When he gently set the red notebook she had been searching for for the whole weekend, on her desk adjacent to her box of 2B pencils, she felt her heart drop into the pit of her stomach but all she said was a sluggish thanks. She could sense his discomfort from the way he stayed a moment longer in front of her, his neatly trimmed finger nails picking at the brass adjuster of his leather satchel bag. But her eyes were fixed on the white board, and she couldn’t look away even if she wanted to. It was only when a comforting blue intercepted that she sunk deeper into her seat and pretended to disappear behind his broad shoulders.

  
She had stayed in school till 8pm that unlucky Friday. She knew she’d lost it even before lunch. But she had spent all of lunch period looking through the bins in the girls’ shower room and the restroom on their floor. She was 15 minutes late to class because she needed that extra time to talk herself out of an impending panic attack. And then her search resumed after school. Nothing. It was like her secret diary had fallen out of her bag and dissipated into a million microscopic specks of dust the second it made contact with the ground. But she knew that wasn’t the case. Because things didn’t just vanish into thin air like that. Especially not red, eye-catching rectangular things with secrets stored in them. It was needless to say someone had taken it. She prayed that it didn’t land in the hands of the wrong people. Wrong meaning big, tall boys with velvet voices so deep they vibrated the classroom desks. Wrong meaning Choi Seunghyun.

  
She should have expected it.

  
For the rest of the day, she pictured him lying in bed, flipping through her writings and picking out all the places she slid his name between formulas and cheesy lyrics. She pictured him scrunching his nose at her bad sketches of the back of his head. She imagined him counting the total number of times she had written his name. And she tried to convince herself that none of that could have possibly happened. Choi Seunghyun had better things to do. Choi Seunghyun didn’t care for girls who didn’t pay attention in class, got average passes for all their subjects and didn’t speak more than three sentences a day to anyone. So nothing had changed since last Friday.

**  
Except now he knew.**

 


	3. Chapter 3

If Choi Seunghyun was bothered by Soojung’s feelings for him, he did a great job hiding it. She had to give him credit for being one of the coolest teenage boys she’d ever known. Boys didn’t keep quiet about such discoveries. Girls didn’t keep quiet about such discoveries. Everyone had to tell somebody. When Kim Youngkwang from the class 2-3 told her he found her cute last year, she texted Jihyun as soon as he was out of sight. She didn’t like Kim Youngkwang that way, but it wasn’t about him. It was about her. She was flattered. It made her feel good about her socially awkward self. It wouldn’t even take her two hours to completely forget it ever happened and she knew that, but she still told somebody about it. If that was the case for Choi Seunghyun, there would be at least one other person who knew. She couldn’t decide if it bothered her, but when a week went by without any gossip, she forgot why it mattered so much in the first place.  
  


Nothing had changed. Soojung still felt herself stiffen up when he walked down the row of desks to get to his seat, and if he was already there before her, she clasped onto the straps of her backpack and walked right ahead like she was rushing to get something from her locker at the back of class. She still unconsciously wrote his name across her notebook, and she still sketched the same back view of his over and over again. Occasionally she dropped a pen his direction, and he’d pick it up and set it carefully on her desk like it was a delicate piece of treasure. She always said thank you. Once, page 3 of his essay on global warming got swept by the spring breeze and landed by the hind legs of her chair. She picked it up with grace and handed it back to him. He said thank you. And in spite of all that, she still kept her static mask of indifference. Nothing had changed.  
  


Until one day when she was waving her lab partner Suji goodbye at the main gate, and a familiar black BMW was driving out of their school foyer. She lowered her head just enough to peek into the back seat, only to realize its usual passenger wasn’t on board. Of course he wasn’t. He was five feet behind her, leaving the school on foot just like everyone else for a change. Soojung looked to the front and quickened her pace.  
  


Choi Seunghyun came and left the school on a luxury ride everyday without fail since his first day in year one. The jerks in the last row in class said his parents owned a chain of department stores, but Soojung suspected he was the son and only heir of a Yakuza. That would explain the height and build. Not forgetting what their teacher had said during his introduction on his first day. Soojung refused to think otherwise.

  
He hadn’t seen her looking back at him, because he was talking to a girl from another class. Mijin was her name, if Soojung’s memory hadn’t failed her. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him laughing with a girl who had no business with people from their class. Their classrooms were right at the end of the corridor, and the only people they interacted with were from class 2-3 (that was how Kim Youngkwang knew her). They only ever heard names and recognized familiar faces if someone stirred trouble or spread gossip and then got in trouble. But Choi Seunghyun was different from everyone in so many ways, Soojung knew it was no surprise.  
  


When she arrived at the junction, she dropped her steely hands from the straps of her backpack and let out a deep sigh. There were only a handful of kids who took the path ahead like Soojung did. The rest turned the corner, out towards the main road. Needless to say, Choi Seunghyun and his new friend were probably part of that larger flock. At least that was what Soojung thought when she shuffled restlessly in her spot, kicking dried leaves and pebbles and anything she could find in her path to vent her frustrations on. It was only when a pebble skidded back in her direction, landing on the tip of her right shoe that she lifted her eyes off of the ground. The frown on her face softened as she met eyes with the unexpected culprit.  
  


“Sorry.” she mumbled flatly and turned away.  
  


Soojung could never read Choi Seunghyun’s faces. His default expression never conveyed any emotion. At least not any she understood. When he strolled down the corridors, his eyes never strayed from his destination unless someone stopped him for a chat. Whenever that happened, he pressed his lips into a firm line and released a tension in his brows you wouldn’t even have realized was present before. Which meant Choi Seunghyun never went around without a subtle scowl on his face. Even when his lips curved into a smile, it never reached his eyes. And the only time he didn’t clench his jaw was when he chewed listlessly on his sandwich during lunch, some days with an extra friend or two across the table. That was exactly why Soojung was starting to feel like a photocopier when she sketched during lessons. But what had thrown Soojung off was that the face she found staring back at her just seconds before the red man turned green wasn’t exactly the face she had memorized. And she didn’t know what the raise in his right brow signified.  
  


She stayed in her spot, tapping the tip of her Mary-Janes against the cement pathway as the green man blinked. Only when Choi Seunghyun was halfway across the street did she start crossing herself. It felt strange watching the ever-so-familiar back view moving so calmly before her down the route home. And it only got stranger when he continued to make all the right turns, down the lane that led to only the dullest building in the neighborhood. What was the son of a conglomerate CEO (or a Yakuza, in Soojung’s insistence) doing in this part of town? And why was he strutting up the steps into her apartment building?  
  


When he arrived at the lobby and pressed for the lift, Soojung came up beside him with an cynical look on her face. He blinked at her, expressionless, and then cleared his throat twice.  
  


“What are you doing here?” she asked with only enough courage to look up to the first button of his blazer.

  
His answer was a brief sigh.

  
It wasn’t long before the lift arrived with a sprightly ding. He gestured for her to go ahead and followed after at a safe distance. And when Soojung didn’t reach for the buttons as naturally quick as she should have, the boy sensed her wariness and hit his level first.

  
“I just moved in last night.” he explained, gaze fixated on the lit number 14.

  
“Guess that means we’re neighbors now.” she replied, gaze fixated on the newly lit number 15.

  
Soojung didn’t sound as nervous as she looked, and she didn’t look half as nervous as she actually felt. She knew very well that she wasn’t the melodramatic trembling mess she inflatedly imagined herself to be. It took years of training with myriad secret crushes to be as collected as Soojung was standing in an enclosed space with the boy who gave her fervent butterflies so nauseating she wondered if she was actually ill. And not to mention the faint whiff of his vanilla scented cologne filling her lungs with every breath she took. The uncomfortable silence only amplified her senses like a stray cat in the dead of the night.

  
“Guess that means we’ll be seeing each other more often.” he remarked out of nowhere, as if he’d disconnected for a good 10 seconds.

  
She bit down on her lower lip and responded with a light nod.

  
The ride up never took more than fifteen seconds, but with the overwhelming presence and stressful silence between every word exchanged, those thirty seconds felt like a good ten minutes. Eventually, the doors opened to his floor and he stepped out. She kept on a straight face as he muttered a short ‘see you tomorrow’ and nodded goodbye. Soojung couldn’t remember if her attempt at returning the greeting turned out the way it should, or if she’d just looked to the ground like a child being punished. All she could recall after was that she’d caught a glimpse of him heading right just before the doors clammed to a complete shut. And she cringed at the thought of him living just directly below her.

  
When she got home, the first thing she did was to call up the security post of their apartment complex.

  
“I think there’s something wrong with the lift, ajusshi.” she complained,

**  
“It’s going a lot slower than usual.”**

 


	4. Chapter 4

Good Morning were the first two words that her groggy mind registered that day. Good Morning in bass, resonating briefly between the three walls before escaping through the last avenue of air when the doors came to a close. Good morning punctuated with a gentle curve up the left corner of his lips. Good morning stealing all the mathematical functions out of the equations she had tried to memorize the night before.   
  


And ’ _yes_ ’ was her answer.

  
“Yes.” she had squeaked before she even realized what was happening.

  
When she was finally awake enough to feel embarrassment, Choi Seunghyun was already holding the lift door open with one hand, idly watching her come to her senses.

  
“ _Mass over distance… universal constant…_ ” she stammered to herself distractedly as she stepped pass him and into the lobby.

  
Soojung had a few wild guesses for why Choi Seunghyun was now living a floor down from her in a tasteless building full of middle-classed people. One was that he was being banished by his millionaire father and was no longer a potential successor to his business, thus forced to give up all forms of luxury. Second was that his Yakuza father was being put in jail, and Choi Seunghyun had no choice but to live life as a commoner now. Both theories sounded extremely plausible to Soojung until she was greeted by the Choi’s signature BMW at the foyer, waiting for the arrival of their young master.

  
She scrunched her nose and turned the other way as the boy hopped onto his ride. She wished she could tell him to take his shiny sedan some place far away where there was more glory to be reflected. Her lifeless grey neighborhood couldn’t handle all the extravagance. But at the same time, she was glad he didn’t take that 15 minutes walk to school. It felt long enough in the summer mornings, she didn’t need the illusion of it being an extra half hour.

  
In lunch period, Soojung always sat with the smartest girls in her class, Sunyoung, Jinri and Suji. And the only reason they didn’t mind having her at the table was because her presence was mostly unfelt. She never had much to contribute. It was a daily routine for the three girls to talk about the piling school work, financial worries and how bleak their future seemed all in that order, until the bell for the next class sent them jumping from their seats. Some days Soojung felt like she couldn’t keep up with their train of thoughts. Other days she wished she didn’t. The only thing Soojung ever really wanted to talk about was how last fall she had only just started on the Fashion King webtoon, and now she’d already gone through every fanfiction there was written about the under appreciated characters and wasted plot opportunities. But even that she didn’t want to share with just anyone.

  
It wasn’t friendship that she shared with the girls, it was simply loyalty. Even if she was never excited to hang out with them, they still waited for her to finish copying the notes on the whiteboard before they left class together. Even if Soojung never said a word to them the entire day, they never walked out of the restroom forgetting her. Even if she found it hard to smile on some days, they still brought her up in their conversations every once in awhile as if to remind her that they didn’t think she was invisible. Even though she wished they did. 

  
And all this was because Soojung gave Jungho a broken nose in year one after he made fun of the way the girls played basketball in gym class. Girls always took these acts of chivalry so seriously like it made them unofficial sworn sisters. She never explained to them that it was never her intention to stand up for anyone. She was just in a really bad mood that day. Jungho’s abhorrent yelling from the sidelines gave her a headache and it just so happened that the ball was in her hands.

  
So they weren’t really friends. She knew that. She thought about it all the time. They wouldn’t care, she’d think to herself whenever she felt the urge to share about something she read on the internet, or some incident that happened at home. But on that bizarre afternoon, as soon as their food trays hit the surface of the table, Soojung felt a knot at the bottom of her throat run loose.

  
“So do you guys think webtoon artists earn a lot?” she blurted, half heartedly poking at her vegetables. The veggie of the day was spicy spinach. She never liked spinach.

  
The three girls exchanged looks of surprise before Sunyoung let out a pleasant laugh.

  
“I think it really depends on the popularity of the webtoon.”

  
“Some publishers don’t pay you in the beginning though,” Suji commented, “The money only comes in when you become famous.”

  
Soojung sipped on her strawberry milk as she looked to Jinri for her share of assessment.

  
Jinri hummed thoughtfully before raising her fork in the air as if she just had the most genius idea.

  
“I heard there are nationwide competitions for webtoon artists. You can earn to three million won if you win!”

  
Soojung dropped her spoon from her mouth and gave Jinri a skeptical look. She knew there were occasional competitions, but three million won? Just imagine the small   
print on the contract.

  
“Why are you asking this, Soojung? Are you going to be a webtoon artist?” Sunyoung asked with wide eyes. Soojung shook her head dismissively with a forced smile.

  
“Is that what you’re always drawing in class?”

  
Soojung froze.

  
“No…What are you talking about?” she laughed sheepishly.

  
The girls laughed along with raised brows but didn’t question any more.

  
The topic of the day averted to the weirdest competitions held all over the world, and then to the things they could do with the ridiculous prize money. Somewhere along the way, Soojung must have blanked out because all of a sudden, the name she had grown so fond of was brought up, and she didn’t even know how they got there.

  
“Is Seunghyun really the inheritor of Choigo departmental store?”

  
“Doesn’t he look the part, though?”

  
“He looks like he’s full of secrets.”

  
And then Jinri said it.

  
“Rather than a conglomerate businessman’s son, don’t you think he fits the role of a notorious gangster more?”

  
“Choi Seunghyun?” Soojung voiced, “ _Maybe._ ”

  
The short discussion ended with some playful nudging and a series of giggles while Soojung poked at her unappetizing tray of overcooked rice and soggy dishes.

  
If Jinri could suggest it, then there was definitely a possibility of Choi Seunghyun being the son of a Yakuza. It wasn’t exactly something Soojung needed advice on, since she pretty much enjoyed making up her version of the story anyways. It just felt refreshing talking about him for once after having him occupy eighty percent of her thoughts for almost a year now. She needed to let those three syllables slip off the surface of her tongue, especially now that he’d just went from an elusive figment of daydream to a face she was going to run into more often than she’d like. The words that have been tickling the back of her throat were getting too hard to ignore. And if loyalty meant anything at all, she hoped the girls didn’t mention it to anyone else.

 


End file.
